Vikingland is the outcome of the exploratory process by Ariel Ninas, Horacio Gonzalez and Xoan-Xil López. This process is the combination of live electronics, real time video processing and the sonorities of the hurdy-gurdy, a medieval instrument present in popular and traditional music along Europe.

The spark that triggers this collaborative project is "Vikingland" a film based on tape recordings of a sailor working at sea by the beginning of the 90s. The tapes and the obscure story behind those lost tapes are the starting point of a project that constructs, depicts and illustrates a whole new story carved in sound, glitch and visual distortion.

Ulobit, use that raw material to build an audiovisual aesthetic around a concrete situation or real-life event. Their work consists on re-apropiating the original material to blur it under contemporary imaginery and technological advance. The interesting point of it is that by doing so, Ulobit serves of a very unique and traditional instrument. It seems that the hurdy-gurdy its a companion in a journey from future to past. Somehow, the particularities of such instruments evoke the need of stepping away form digital culture, seeking for a forgotten past of video tapes and VHS textures.

Through that journey, analogue video serves as the anchor with the past, always splattered by the uncertainty of digital glitch, a reminder of the actual moment. In such a perfect match, the electronics establish a mood and linkage with the nowness. The hurdy-gurdy travels through time, sound and image creating a mesh braiding and tiding all together.

Ulobit, is a very good example of a compact project, a finely crafted proposal that has been evolving through the years and its sending us again, a message that audiovisual experimentation in our country can be found at its finnest.

In the music of Ulobit, the sound of the electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy, an instrument with a wide range of possible timbres, fuses with the texture of the electronics to manipulate in real time the video images. This method of composition, based on a creative process of experimentation and research, results in a soundscape situated between drone aesthetics, glitch art and abstraction.Vikingland 2016 is based on from home-recorded Hi8 tapes taken by Galician sailor “O Haia” in the 90’s on board the Vikingland, a ferryboat carrying goods between the city of Romo (Denmark) and the isle of Sylt (Germany).Filmmaker Xurxo Chirro found these tapes and created a movie in 2011. Now Ulobit takes this raw material to give a new meaning to those images through music.